Thus, knowing that to move sport is lawful for an orator or
anyone that shall talk in open assembly, good it were to know what
compass he should keep that should thus be merry.

thomas wilson , the art of
rhetoric (1560)

Thomas More married twice and both
of his wives were short in stature. When asked the reason for this,
More replied, “of two evils one should choose the
less.”1 So reads a selection from the “witty
sayings” of More, which Thomas Stapleton compiles in his 1588
biography. Though the quip could be apocryphal, it represents well
enough what R. S. Sylvester calls More’s “sharp and ironic view of
both himself and others,”2 a provocative
deployment of wit, which More’s admirers often ignore and his
critics frequently misunderstand.

Indeed, whether to celebrate or condemn More’s humor was a
subject during his own life and in the immediate years following
his death. Erasmus writes of More’s “rare courtesy and sweetness of
disposition,” which is so great that there is no one “so melancholy
by nature that More does not enliven him.” According to Erasmus,
More takes such pleasure in jesting that he seems born for it and
“any remark with more wit in it than ordinary always gave him
pleasure, even if directed against himself.”3
Stapleton elaborates upon that sense of wit, writing how More’s
“keen humor” functions in tandem with his “never-broken serenity”
of mind and “constant peace and joy of his
conscience.”4 So, too, even though Thomas Wilson
was tried and imprisoned for heresy during the reign of Queen Mary,
in his The Art of Rhetoric (1560), he calls attention
to More’s facility in “pleasant delights, whose wit even at this
hour is a wonder to all the world and shall be undoubtedly even
unto the world’s end.”5 Most famous, perhaps, is
the Sir Thomas More play (c. 1593–1600), which was
written, in part, by William Shakespeare. In this work, More
appears as a “merry man,” who pull pranks, tells jokes, and
performs in plays.6

Yet there were also early detractors. The Protestant
martyrologist, John Foxe, admits in his Acts and
Monuments of 1583 that More is “in wit and learning
singular” but adds that More “dallieth out the matter, thinking to
jest poor simple truth out of countenance.”7
More’s jests form part of his poetical and therefore imaginative
vision of Catholic doctrine. Thus, of More’s defense of purgatory,
Foxe wonders if More writes of another Utopia or no
place.8 More, as “author and contriver” of
“poetical” books, merely imagines purgatory exists, according to
Foxe.9 Earlier, More had written against William
Tyndale, “I marvel that Tyndale denies purgatory—except that he
intends to go to hell.”10 And Tyndale, whose
biography Foxe would write as the story of a “true servant and
martyr of God,”11 first called More “a poet of
shame” and the “the proctor of purgatory,” a protector of a
nonexistent place, what Foxe later labels a
nusquam.12

In this way, More’s mocking rejoinders and polemical style are
said to dovetail with too vivid an imagination. By 1587, Edward
Hall, a Gray’s Inn lawyer and a historian, records of More that his
“wit was fine, and full of imaginations, by reason whereof he was
too much given to mocking, which was to his gravity a great
blemish.” So Hall wonders of More: “I cannot tell whether I should
call him a foolish wise man, or a wise foolish man, for undoubtedly
he, beside his learning, had a great wit, but it was so mingled
with taunting and mocking, that it seemed to them that best knew
him, that he thought nothing to be well spoken except he had
ministered some mock in the communication.”13

Hall’s charge, in effect, recycles and builds upon what More’s
first interlocutors allege.14 “They reprove,”
More remarks of them, “that I bring in, among the most earnest
matters, fancies and sports and merry tales.” More cites the Roman
poet Horace in his defense because “a man may sometime say full
sooth in game...

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